ISBN: 978-0-593-71799-8

October 22, 2026

Longtime readers will known that The Booklight thas been burned on Tom Clancy derivative works in the past. It was with some trepidation, then, that Defense Protocol in the Clancy universe was leafed through. China is at it again trying to annex Taiwan with a false flag initiative and now Jack Ryan and his daughter, who is an intelligence analyst of some renown due to her handling of a submarine incident—presumably in another book—have to stop the dastardly design before the entire world is plunged into a Chinese hegemony helmed by a megalomaniac driven only by thoughts of his eventual legacy as the re-uniter of that which was artificially and unjustly divided.

Thankfully, the book pulls the tale off in a way commensurate with the Clancy ethos. Andrews and Wilson are familiar enough with Naval Intelligence since they both come from backgrounds in the Seals or submarine commanding. This gives the authors the ability to speak the language with a natural fluency. Of course, Clancy achieved the same thing without having been in the service, so in a roundabout way the circle here completes as the outsider that made his way in has a legacy that is picked up by insiders who are working to make things for those who are on the outside, in this case, largely civilians who have a taste for the Clancy forms of narrative.

The political maneuvering of China to both utilize and dispense with human resources to further its goals is executed precisely, and consistently with what one has learned to expect of news that often conceals covert directives. For instance, an old tactic that one still sometimes sees is the impugning of one's character where allegations of affairs or sexual impropriety are involved along with some other treasonous importuning by various rags of wide audience reach. This template is used precisely in the book along with the attendant deadly consequences such accusations can entail especially in places like China.

The reader also gets dropped into the movements of a Seal strike team that has several mission objectives throughout the book which combine, as one expects, with all the acronyms and military jargon with which a typical Clancy novel is known to be replete. The pacing and tempo are about right for a modern reader, although one might say that the end comes a little too abruptly even if it is satisfying. It is as though the authors were too aware of the page count and had a directive to "wrap it up". They performed the task admirably, but if one misses five or six critical pages, one finds themselves at the end of the book with many questions. The pacing of the conclusion, then, could have used a slower tempo.

This book, while being a little shorter and less complex than a regular Tom Clancy work, can at least claim to sit at the same table while not blushing and staring at the floor and kicking at the grout with the tips of its shoes. When the bread is broken at this meal, it is met by a strong grip and a direct gaze. It is good to see some life coursing back into the Clancy universe that is worthy of the originator.

Not much will be spoken of Jack Ryan here other than to say he does Jack Ryan things. Things Jack Ryan has done before, but there is a heavy hint of what might be called the Indiana Jones penchant for trying to pass the torch. The future is Katie! A Female president might be Katie! She is following in her Dad's footsteps! She did not do a Hunt for Red October thing, but she has her own sub exploit! Check her out! She can save the day!

The kid spin-off is the predictable route that most writers might try with something like Clancy. Of course, they might also leave well enough alone and let Jack Ryan get a bit older before they try to plug him with a political dynasty centered on his genetic offspring.

Other than these mostly forgivable qualms, the book is an excellent read although a seasoned reader will blow through it in no time at all. Perhaps such a book is best suited for a flight, or a short hotel stay. One wonders what Clancy himself might have made of it though. He might have said, "Nice try, but write your own book!"

ISBN: 9780063028050

September 26, 2026

Termination Shock is the weakest Neal Stephenson book out of any reviewed on this site. While the book has the emaciated outlines of a typical quality Stephenson novel, it is not lacking for the Stephenson quotidian girth that most of his works embody at over 700 pages. Nobody would mind the length of the novel if the roughly 600 pages occurring before were of a manner and type that made you care about the characters and the plot. Instead, it looks like Stephenson took every liberal political point of the left and decided that all that would make for a good work.

Instead of the typical intrigue and future-looking orientation of Stephenson, we get treated to man-made global warming, COVID, Chinese intelligence Psyops, and a whole host of Dutch problems which abut against pieces or characters from System of The World. Granted, they are not the same characters. Yet, William of Orange is here again, except now he is outstandingly homosexual and old and sad because he is old and homosexual. We also meet a Dutch Queen, who, not completely out of character with the culture of the Netherlands, is stuck in political intrigue and is also over-horny. We meet a Texan-Native-American-blend character whose family suffers a horrible tragedy that puts him on a trajectory that intersects with these main characters in increasingly absurd ways. We get to know a Sikh martial arts enthusiast who plays a key role for his country in the evolution of the story. We get to meet a crazy Texan guy who is representative of Big Oil who wants to solve global warming by, and I kid you not, making a huge gun that fires sulfur bullets into the sky at intervals in imitation of volcanic eruptions.

If that all sounds rather stupid to you, it is likely because it is. While Stephenson has thought the details of the plot out carefully and includes diagrams of the "Big Gun" one cannot help but feel he has sold out and pandered to the political left in concocting this story since so much of it depends on talking points the American political left propounds. Since the book was released in 2021, it is possible that Stephenson was holed up because of COVID and it did something to his writing skills or his typical imagination. It surely did something to the world in that confinement made everyone who had to partake of such sequestering restless an squirrely. Even with all that, though, it is hard to forgive Stephenson from looking at the ground and writing about the most captivating pebble in his immediate vision. Scratch that, actually. That would possibly be more interesting. Instead, it was like Stephenson was watching CNN and decided everything they were saying would make for a good book.

The last hundred pages or so feature a modern-drone-tech-versus-nature showdown. This part is easily the best piece of the work as one feels something for a moment over the nature of the hunt and survival of one of the characters caught in the battle. To speak of the outcome of the battle would give the end of the book away, and while that might be doing a service to most of humanity, it is sufficient to say that in the battle there are casualties. Of course, the reading this reviewer had made a very "meh" impression when those casualties rolled in. Likewise the concluding sexual double entendres. James Bond this is not, though it seems to try to be with all the interactions between William of Orange and Chinese intelligence.

While Stephenson sometimes falters on the trigger when it comes to his literary works, the momentary flinch can be forgiven when the execution that follows is experienced. Not so in this case. You are better off skipping this work and it is entirely possible that the Termination Shock, which is supposed to be about repercussions about the sudden cessation of things, applies to Neal Stephenson's authoring career after this volume was pushed out there in what one hopes was some kind of cash grab. If it was an effort at a serious work of futurism tinged with Sci-Fi, it fails the litmus test.

ISBN: 978-1785307430

August 18, 2026

If you want to tell the history of the alphabet the first thing you must decide is which alphabet it is that you want to tell the history of. Then, you must decide which culture best tells that history. Mr. Bate in Why Q Needs U tries to straddle the line. We often find ourselves back in Rome, or Egypt, or Israel. Often, we are introduced to the Phoenicians. While Mr. Bate is careful not to take a side concerning where the alphabet began, many of his unsolvable mysteries neatly resolve themselves if one makes the assumption that Israel, or the Semitic alphabet, is the point of origin and from there many other countries have taken and modified those essentials for their varying ends and needs.

A central debate that Mr. Bate is careful to point out centers on whether spelling should be by form or by sound. In other words, should spelling be governed more by convention, or more by what the ear hears? There are arguments to be made on both sides—either for preservation of the root and history of the word or for the ease of use that being able to sound out a word could impute concerning the necessary "correct" spelling. For instance, when one spells the word "dog" one does not spell it "dawg"—except maybe in some slang derivations. The second spelling looks more like how the word sounds whereas the first does not really show the way the word sounds without knowing the rule that it is pronounced with a certain kind of "o" sound.

The headliner letter, namely Q and why it needs U, is probably the letter that Mr. Bate likes least in that it seems he is always arguing that it really should not be there except for those pesky Romans who kept it around and then various tribes that held on to it and re-introduced it. The reason the U has to follow it is because, in short, the sound for Q and K were often mixed up, and the sounds for QU were specific and unique enough to warrant keeping the Q in the box of necessary phonemes or sounds.

We learn that the Semitic Vav turned into a bunch of other letters, like F, V, U, W, and Y. I guess the "tent peg" of the vav must have had all those other letters in the tent, although one wonders whether it was not a circus with some Shriner cars. We also explore a lot of alternative spellings from things in Middle English that only appear vaguely recognizable and are later mixed with German and French with some Norse thrown in for good measure. The English that preceded is not "leet" enough, and so the new language turns into a kind of odd amalgamation of these languages for perceived "prestige." This coincides roughly with William the Conqueror taking the throne and causing a perception shift in the relative "specialness" of the new languages being spoken in court.

Often times, when one is reading any book about linguistics, it is hard to make sure the notation is matched in the reader's mind to the actual sound it implies. There is a kind of special coding that linguists use in order to show the kind of accents that are present when a person is speaking, and some of that lightly makes its way into the book. If one happens not to be a linguist, one has to remind one's self about what sound a given indicated symbol is supposed to represent. There is a glossary present of terms, but it is sadly bereft of phonemes and their notations.

The sharpest criticism one can level, though, is that it feels like Mr. Bate is trying to play it safe in the political realms with many of his examples and lack of commitment to what he considers to be the oldest alphabet. He tries to keep the letters up front, but one can catch whiffs of PC kinds of thinking from time to time as though the publisher nudged him to include an Islamic quote or a Christian quip. This lack of strong belief in terms of origins keeps Mr. Bate guessing as to why the alphabet ended in a Tav for so long. He notes only that the reason for alphabets doing this was lost to the mists of time. It is not to people that speak Hebrew, though. Since the Messiah was hanged on a cross or a Tav, it was a harbinger of the end and a sign of the plan of redemption. It is little wonder, then, that Rome and Egypt wanted to muddy those waters. Such obfuscation could allow one to think of Caesar as always being and never ceasing. An especially piquant reminder of Rome's foibles would be to show everyone that the fella they decided to execute on the cross is also the last letter of our alphabet in the sense that it is a cross. A Roman citizen would be especially familiar with a crucifixion. Egypt, on the other hand, was keen to tie in Y-like characters as a representation of a desert viper. Why? Probably because Egypt wanted to be powerful and cool. That Tav there at the end, that simply would not do. So, the penalty for playing it safe is less explanatory power. Of course, this explanation requires the belief that Noah was the progenitor of all the people living on the Earth which is definitely not academically in vogue.

This absence, though, makes the book sometimes hard to read because one is having to read about the "theory" of why a certain letter is a certain way when the Hebrew makes it perfectly clear WHY it is that way. It could be no other way, and some of the explanation that follows is a little like a Scooby Doo episode where every ghost is just Mr. Biggs who is wearing a prosthetic mask because he hates those "meddlin' kids."

That's not to say, though, that the book is bad. If anything, the thorough scholarship keeps one interested enough to outweigh the annoyance of slogging through "what-ifs". One can learn much about how words have changed over time, and how F's and W's and all manner of other exotic sounds crisscrossed as everyone colluded to try to figure out how to spell what they were saying. Also, they were trying to figure out how to say what they were saying. Letters were emphasized and disappeared whereas others made themselves guests to a given word party and then later became permanent fixtures. Vowels were shortened and elongated and sometimes dropped. It is, to say the least, a fascinating thing to watch from a distance and worth a read for the long perspective such analysis provides.

ISBN: 978-125039123-0

August 4, 2026

There is not much to like about the content of Careless People. It proves challenging to get past the strong political beliefs of the author, who was an attorney for the UN and rubs shoulders with the folks at Davos and feels like Soros is being treated unfairly because he had some antisemitism tossed his way. Of course, this is exactly the profile a person might need to go to work at Facebook as a kind of diplomatic consult, and the author was not going to Davos before joining Facebook and appears not to have enjoyed it anyway.

First of all, the author was bitten by a shark when she was 13. It nearly killed her, and it is the tale with which she opens this textual exposé. It is an apropos tale, that is not perhaps fully integrated by the author as she never fully equates the shark bite she got with the people at Facebook being opportunistic predators akin to sharks. It could be she wishes it to be understated intentionally so the reader makes the comparison, or it could be that she chose to swim with these finned killers because she believed as a true-believer does in the potential of Facebook to change the world as so is blind to the implication. Sarah Wynn-Williams thought she was the right person to give advice to Facebook's naif staff on politics in general and had the right résumé to create her job title which could be characterized as diplomatic consult where international political protocol was involved. All of these ponderings are naive at best and narcissistic indulgences at worst, but then, who among us has not, especially in their youth, been taken in by some ideal that proved to be something other than we had first conceptualized? For this, we can forgive the author her youthful predispositions.

What comes next is a gradual disintegration of her predispositions through the awfulness of the staff of Facebook which is largely comprised of self-identifying Jewish Harvard graduates. The teller of the tale, though, is not, as she is from New Zealand. (Get it? New Zeal? Tee hee!) When she arrives at Facebook HQ, nobody cares much about politics as it is 2010 or so and Facebook has not yet taken that specific role in the cultural conversation. It is about to, though, and Ms. Williams is ahead of anticipating that ride. Soon, Zuckerberg and entourage are on the stage with heads of states of countries and are gaining private audiences with Obama. And oh yeah, they are basically only concerned about growing the company of Facebook while genocides fueled by the platform are roaring in the background. This, as to be expected, has a demoralizing effect on the author, but she gets in too deep and is too tight into the circle of trust of these players to be able to extricate herself with ease. The situation is made worse after becoming a mother and being forced to work through her pregnancy, being invited to "bed" with a senior staff member, and having no consideration whatsoever toward her family needs. This is where the "careless people" title is derivative, in part.

Of course, Ms. Williams begins to discuss the role Facebook played in electing Trump, and characterizes what happened as that he out-spent everyone else for "misinformation" and this is what allows him to leverage Facebook in such a way that he becomes the next President. All of the Facebook staff save one ex-Republican staff adviser are crestfallen at this outcome, and Ms. Williams does not do a great job at hiding her own bias. She would have been happier, she thinks, had Hillary won, though she does not say as much.

Of particular interest, though, is that Zuckerberg eventually gets a "dressing down" from Obama himself telling him that he needs to fix Facebook or else the next election could also be lost. The way Ms. Williams characterizes Facebook is that they have the demographics in the palm of their hand so the ads reach the market section that that need to reach. This system works so well, in fact, that they are able to target teens in the 13-17 year old age range who delete a selfie and then deliver beauty products directly to them to capitalize on their momentary insecurity. They are well aware also of the addictive behaviors that Facebook is driving in children. Bluntly, they do not care, and behind closed doors they compare their industry to the once humongous nicotine business that fell apart after it had to admit that cigarettes are addictive. Does Obama mean that they should fix this taking advantage of children? No. He is referring to the fact that the ads worked well precisely because they were so targeted to their audiences. This is not a bug, but it is to Obama, and affirms much suspicion around how Obama saw the situations that he found himself within and probably also says something about his perception today.

The people at the top of the Facebook chain have so much money coming in that what something costs has absolutely no relevance. They purchase niche luxuries that only the extremely wealthy can dream up. Of course, all this wealth is being generated by "Facebook users" and causing children to feel insecure and addicted to social validation. This, one assumes, is another part of the "careless" moniker. Who cares if the kids suffer if you can afford Macadamia nuts to feed your cows for Wagyu beef?

Even though the author does not see herself as among the entitled in this narrative, it is clear she is. She is not living in the same kind of delusion as the rest of the staff, to be sure. She is, however, living in a world where she thinks Hillary Clinton is/was a lesser evil than Donald Trump, despite seeing her in person dancing at a random dingy nightclub in a Latin American country. She is constantly in the orbit of people who are extremely wealthy, extremely powerful, and now known to be extremely corrupt. How did she think this situation was going to turn out, exactly? Did she think they would be grateful for her prescient advice? No. Sharks see food, and they eat and attack.

Still, Ms. Williams goes through hell to get this story, and she is not done yet as she mentions she is prohibited from saying anything about Facebook at the risk of $50,000 fines for each infraction. One supposes she must have gotten the book through before this dynamic was implemented, or else it applies only to verbal utterances as opposed to published works.

The read is thoroughly disgusting. It is hard not to hate everyone described. One can take solace in knowing, though, that there is a Judgment Day. Still, if you want to understand how people think who made obscene money off of what you allowed to access your data, this book is worth a read—in order to understand how the "elite think".

ISBN 13: 9781737650782

July 28, 2026

Mark Blitz asserts that he was one of the first people to observe the pattern of lunar and solar eclipses back in 2008 that other authors—like Jonathan Cahn—who has several pieces of work reviewed here, have made popular in books detailing the pattern that occurs in Biblical literature called the Shemitah. Blitz's claim is that he noticed it on a NASA chart back then, but that he did not know what it meant. He knows now, he says, that it means war—multiple kinds of war—war leading right on in to Armageddon.

He observes that the eclipses that matter happen on Biblical feast days or big Hebrew holidays, and believers should pay careful attention when a day does this. The pattern Mr. Blitz saw way back in 2008 falls on a series of Hebrew dates of significance in thatthey are all feast days or High Holy Days. Others had urged him to write this book so as not to be left out of the discussion around his early notice of these days. The outcome, then, is America At War 2024-2026. The subtitle of The Sons of Light Vs The Sons of Darkness is a direct quote from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mr. Blitz is aware of this, and so invites the comparison.

There is a lot to like about Mr. Blitz's work in that he carefully backs up his assertions and "shows his work." The force of his arguments for his perspective depends solely on the axioms upon which they rest. There are several weak pillars that can lead to a shaky roof. The first big assumption that Mr. Blitz makes is that the creation calendar is a good calendar to use for calculating longer patterns of time. If this assumption proves incorrect, and there is reason to suppose the Dead Sea Calendar is markedly different than the Creation Calendar, then the correlation of the dates proffered while interesting ultimately becomes a kind of exercise in noticing patterns in calendars that have been defined by other sects for their own purposes.

Another shaky spot that Mr. Blitz often alludes to concerns Solomon being a kind of Anti-Christ. He leans on this understanding to try to interpret the Song of Solomon in a certain light. What he overlooks is that Solomon himself can be disobedient and also NOT be the Anti-Christ. However, such disobedience as Solomon performs is how the Anti-Christ comes to be. There is a key difference here between IS a type of Anti-Christ and BEHAVES in a way such that the Anti-Christ comes into being. Lots of people enabled Hitler to come into power, but there was only one Hitler. Solomon is not Hitler.

When interpreting the Song of Solomon, instead of seeing the Shepherd that the woman in the work is attracted to as being some competition for Solomon or an extension of her own narcissism, it is instead the bride hearing the call of the future Messiah to which she naturally is inclined. The best she has, in her present scenario though, is her husband who, we suppose through the analysis Mr. Blitz uses, is Solomon.

While Mr. Blitz swings and misses at some pitches, though, he wins the ball game by focusing on the greater meaning of the eclipses themselves and even if he is using a slide rule based on an incorrect calendar, he is still able to put the shuttle in orbit around the moon in that he notices that all the patterns that look like the ones he notices in 2008 tend to happen around Israel experiencing some major shifts such as the pattern that occurred in 1967 and 1968. He therefore supposes that war is imminent, and it is probably going to be with Israel's perennial enemies, the Edomites/Amorites. He traces a lot of interesting origins when it comes to the names of people living in Israel, such as Palestinians, which he interprets to mean as "invader." He does the same with certain Hebrew words, and notes, as many others have, that the Hebrew word for violence is Hamas.

He does offer a defense on Biblical terms of no one knowing the day or the hour of the end by pointing that his calculations are not meant to be ironclad but that believers are supposed to be aware of the signs of the end approaching. This, he stipulates, is his main intent—to let believers know that these heavenly signs are not random and have severe, earth-shaking consequences.

Sometimes his writing is a little bit disconnected and could have used the help of a good editor to make sure his ideas connect strongly, but there is an endearing quality to the vernacular he uses when he is telling his view as often times one might see a "duh" or "wowsers" tossed into the mix. One feels more like they are in on a conversation than a polished work, but this actually works for the material he is promoting.

Where things go off track is that Mr. Blitz does suggest that he thinks a lot of stuff is going to hit the fan in 2024-2026. Much of what he thinks might happen has not happened in the time that has passed, and 2026 has more days behind it than ahead of it. Again, nothing he predicts is a guarantee, but it might have been better to title the book America at War and leave the dates off since that gives the title a definite shelf appeal for a designated time. After that, readership will tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and see the book as being false when the majority of the content is true. It just happens to be very difficult to calculate the timing of Biblical events because so many calendars have come and gone.

The final part that Mr. Blitz emphasizes which is, perhaps, somewhat detrimental to the work is that he thinks there will be a "boots on the ground" war in America. He sees the eclipse as a sign for America in specific, and interprets that it means America itself will be judged. On the other hand, an eclipse is also a sign for penitence, but he does not mention this possibility as much as the "catastrophe" aspect of America going into some kind of Biblical upheaval. While the 2017 eclipse happened only over America, and such eclipses can mean the judgment of a nation, they can also signal a type of awakening and penitence that a nation performs. One must always be a little suspicious of dire calamity being forecast for one's own home continent. One may be right, or, like Nineveh, one may be wrong. What one wishes to avoid is being compared to Jonah and being asked "Was your anger rightly kindled?"

If you have never had an introduction to Biblical prophecy and the timing of events like eclipses, you could do far worse than Mark Blitz's book. Pick it up, add it to your shelf, and ponder what he has to say carefully.

July 22, 2026

Pilgrims of the Sword by the Grand Scrivener proclaims itself to be the official history of the Knight's Templar Order. To be specific, this history is in its first volume, and more volumes are anticipated as this tome brings us up to the times of Jacques De Molay—the last Grandmaster of the Ancient Order.

An incipient question from the stated jurisdiction of the proclamation indicated in the title presents itself insistently. Why, precisely, is this the official history, and how is it that this Grand Scrivener was chosen to be the chronicler? This concern arises in multiple ways as the thesis within the cover is advanced and becomes dismissive of so-called "Hollywood truths" concerning the Knight's Templar. While there is, without question, a tremendous amount of garbage about any subject that gets made into movies and books, there does come a point when an author presents other works as being mere fiction that one feels compelled to state with some Shakespearian authority that "Thou protesteth too much." In other words, if the history written is real, the reader should not need further prodding to remind them that this is so. One should not need to be constantly reminded that this is like "totally real, bra."

The reason that legitimacy of the narrative and who gets to tell the story are important matters is because when you get into a subject like the Knight's Templar, everyone fancies themselves a gatekeeper. Where there is a movie deal or a book to be cut, or a Templar Order, not far behind are people who are keen to present and position themselves as the real thing, and everything else as ersatz. In other words, trying to make sure one's place is secure in the book market arena is not an easy task and is especially difficult if one writes history since history is interpreted by the victors? Communists? At the very least, publishers with a desire to sell books to target audiences and make a decent return.

This appeal to legitimacy because of "reasons" which the reader is promised will appear in the next volume is the biggest vice the author indulges. It obligates him or her to step outside the bounds of the Templar history on more than one occasion to discuss some other historical fact that might have a tangential relation to the Order that is packed with landmines and speculation. The bluster of the author though dismisses any doubts to his or her inerrant claim to the truth of the history stated with a waive of the hand when they occur as if they have no more reality to them than the monster in the closet in a child's bedroom. On several occasions the reviewer caught the author asserting facts that are simply not so. In other cases, there is a willful myopia where lack of evidence is cited that implies that the researcher simply did not care to spend the time to find confirming evidence of matters related to the Order and how it in turn related to other groups of the era.

Once you get past this rather annoying tendency, though, the book is packed with interesting facts and details about the rise of the Knight's Templar and the considerable amount of fighting they undertook against the Islamic armies and Asian factions in the Holy Land and the surrounding regions. The French term Outremer is applied to the entirety of the territory involved. What follows is a blow-by-blow account of a particular perspective through the eight or nine crusades, depending on what you count as a crusade, that culminates in a Muslim victory at Acre that is devastating in every sense of the word.

The Templars are not exonerated of their misdeeds, which is a good historical technique to utilize if you want people to believe you have an unbiased interpretation. The fact is clear that people went to the Holy Land not so much out of religious zeal but more because they desired land, wealth, and pillage along with the spoils that provided. While this was less of a motivating factor during the First Crusade, by the Eighth it is almost an enterprise. Kings answer the Pope in part because of political reasons, and the Order finds itself trying to maintain independence in what is quickly become sectarian in terms of who is doing the crusading and how well they get on with the current Grandmaster of the Order or whether they have beef with how someone previously interacted with them or their cousin. There is some visceral Game of Thrones business going on to the repulsion of the Muslim forces.

What is clearer even than the land-grabbiness of the Franks and Crusaders though, is the absolute lack of any redeeming moral fiber that the Islamic armies possess. They are playing a game of annihilation which courts selling Christians as slaves while raping, killing, and slitting their throats at every opportunity they can muster. They hate the "true piece of the cross" and the Messiah by extension as they deny His resurrection and see the Christians as heretics to be slain like chattel. As devious as the cunning Lords and Kings are of the Franks and Crusaders, the Islamic forces are willing to sink to new lows to slake their blood lust on what they believe are intruders to "their" land. The depiction of the Muslim deeds at Acre is still enough of an outrage 1,000 years later as to motivate a Christian believer today to be very firm in their opposition to Islam being any manner of "liberating" ideology.

By the end, the Crusaders feel like God has abandoned them as all the places they had taken and held were once again under Muslim control. What's more, everyone seems to have "burned out" on crusading in general. This might be because the need for land was sated, or it could also be because the trading agreements with the Islamic forces had made many who might have originally been Crusaders very rich either in trading directly with the Muslims, or charging the Crusaders exorbitant prices in tandem with Muslim supplied goods. The only people willing to undertake a crusade by the end of the book are the poor, or so the author maintains. It does seem to be the case that due to a focus that was entirely too material the impetus to crusade was less attractive to the nobles and kings who typically mustered the troops. People stopped listening to good advice. Their pocketbooks were making too many decisions for them, and many people had settled into a kind of Persian-Arab lifestyle they did not want disturbed. This is the main reason for the disaster at Acre if one looks beyond all the other causes that potentially could be blamed.

Of course, The Knight's Templar and the Order were still very rich, and where a kind of multinational corporation and the Muslims were not so adept at the sea and the Templar soldiers had a kind of navy along with naval skill. There is a definite Return of the Jedi momentum established in the ashes. How the Grand Scrivener intends to do this is uncertain but he or she does reassure us that it is proper for the Order to ask for money to make sure this effort occurs. They are, after all, The Real Knight's Templar and are, after all, putting out the only real history. The reader did not forget that, right?

July 5, 2026

Though these are bound in two individual books, they are a series which is being referred to, in Latin, as Deus Vult, or God Wills.

The Great Replacement, and how to resist it, is actually the first of these. This book came out as COVID was settling into a lockdown formation. It is therefore interesting since it was on the frontline of information stating that COVID was mostly a scare tactic utilized in order to make civilization assume a different form. In some cases, people were outright murdered in that they were rushed to nursing homes that they did not need care from only to be exposed to sick people who did need such care. In others, it is a gentler nudge in the direction of not owning anything and rescuing the planet in the name of being green.

The big identity shift offered by this book, however, involves a different kind of Christianity that the author, who calls himself the Grand Scrivener, refers to as "muscular Christianity". The idea behind the appellation is that Christian men ought to be defined by deeds that are manly and should take actions in the world to alleviate the suffering of their fellow Christians as well as those who are less fortunate. A larger portion of the argument for a kind of strength arising from Christianity is that it naturally tends to mercy toward the weak and helpless whereas many other world religions, particularly Islam, do not share the same emphasis as a priority or as a necessity.

An argument is proffered that when times get rough, it is usually people with muscle who come in and fill the vacuum left behind by power dynamics that have vacated their traditional roles. Generally speaking, the author notes that these tend to be young men and often they are of a sort that are pushed to the edge of the civilization they occupy because they are seen as gruff characters.

It does not require much of an inferential mindset to understand that the argument is going to be going toward having children since children are where young men are made.

What might prove surprising, however, is the author's willingness to align with Hezbollah more than the state of Israel. Indeed, the author comes close to a kind of replacement theology that the Jews in Israel really are not Israel, but that the Christian Church actually is. There is more than a little posturing and discussion about Zionism and how it is an undesirable thing that is not Biblical for the simple fact that no one knows when the Day of Judgment is supposed to arrive. This overlooks the point, though, that should the Day of Judgment be now, it would make the author potentially wrong about the Jews in Israel and what their role is since God can take those who occupy Zion and either remove them or exalt them. Historically, previous to World War II, this is exactly what happened as early settlers came to Israel and began to settle there in the late 19th century. Eventually, this act fomented into World War II, and some of the people who settled there remained whereas many, many more new people were brought to the land in a prophetic fulfillment of returning Jewish people back to the land of Israel.

The author does not do a great job distinguishing between a cultural Zionism that feels like there is some kind of Jewish dominance behind it versus the spiritual Zionism that is the actual Zionism that every believer wants. It begs the question that if the author believes he has a bead on the actual spiritual Zionism, why is it the case he does not appear to live there? Indeed, any Christian believer that calls itself the real Israel that is not living in Israel must, sooner or later, ask themselves if they actually believe that, or if they just want to ignore the actual inhabitants of Israel in the form of the Jewish people who are there now.

With both of these huge red waving flags ignored, though, the rest of the book contains information that most any believer can agree upon. Sometimes it is wise for a believer to ignore certain pieces where they do not align for a greater good with other believers. Sometimes, one has to engage the person on the points. The second act usually results in fracturing and splintering, which is why most believers avoid the confrontation. On the other hand, if one does not challenge the growth of a tree once in awhile, how does one know the wood is not rotten?

The author, at another point toward the end, has some advice to give young men that has an interesting flavor to it. While it is not necessarily wrong, it also is not also entirely right and can be misconstrued. Much of the advice is fatherly in nature, and is indeed passed between some sons and fathers. The book probably is not the best conduit for it, since it lacks the nuance of interaction a face-to-face offers.

The second book in the series, The Great Reset Resistance, is a recapitulation of some of the points in the first book but in finer detail. Easily the first half makes the case that one should not expect to find themselves in a cushy existence if they start resisting and succeeding in their resistance. There are many stories of Christian martyrs and how they died. A large portion of the work discusses the Covenanters in Scotland and what happened to them. Likewise there is an exploration of what happened to many Catholics in Ireland during "the penal times." The reason these stories are advanced is to prepare a person for the kind of persecution they might need to expect should they find themselves in a complete crackdown on their religious freedom.

The next part deals with the importance of having children, and making sure one's resolution remains firm to be free. There is a segue into what to expect with currency crashing and what to do about it, and the solution promulgated in the text relies heavily on Bitcoin being an answer to that predicament. Finally, there is a more hands on what to do about it, which includes growing your own food and homeschooling as much as possible and moving out of large cities. There is even a guide on what to do if you find yourself in jail.

What you do not find advocated in either work is a call to arms. The opinion of the author in the second work and the first is that such thinking is more likely to get a valuable young man killed because it is not a good time for such an uprising to take place. Later on down the road though, when the birthrate has shifted, well, it might be a different story. So while the Christianity here is "muscular" it is not intrinsically violent, but it does note that there is a marked effort to replace white people with Islamic sorts of believers and that the best thing to do, for now, is resist that pull until the shifting groundwork of the spiritual war through the flesh of the believers is made more manifest by having more flesh in the form of future fighters and soldiers in the ongoing cultural war. The call here is more to propagation of children than stockpiles of ammunition. The author chastises people who are believers who have not had children and decries them as being extremely selfish. One wonders, at times, if the author remembers all the people in the Bible who either did not have kids, adopted kids, or wound up having kids in some unexpected way like Joseph and Mary. He seems to only see through the lens of soldiers on the field which is a valid, but myopic, way of seeing the totality of the battle. Of course, if the main aim is to achieve a "muscular Christianity" then these observations make more sense as the Bible does say that the strength of a given nation is often measure by the children it has. Egypt certainly feared the numbers of the Israelis under Moses. However, we are told not everyone followed Moses who was Hebrew. This is the part that the author overlooks. Not all children follow in the steps of their parents, although he does admit the possibility that this might be a scenario of concern. Mathematically, he argues though, that the odds are that more believers will be made by having children by believers than those who will fall away who also had believers for parents. It is an interesting thought to consider.

The theme which is greatly emphasized is being able to pass on one's stories and culture to their children such that it is harder to erase whether it be from "communistic" sorts, (which the author points out has a Jewish root) or Islamic, or some part of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset apparatus. There are plenty of targets that wish to replace the predominate Christian culture. A group that is not named so often, though, are the wealthy in general. There are wealthy people in specific. Wealthy people in general are only lumped in as much as they are interested in participating in some Great Reset dynamic.

A stylistic notice through both works is that there are some glaring typos. The first book probably has these because there was a rush to get it out, but the second has some inconsistencies that a decent proof reader would catch. It is likely these books are coming from an independent press since no ISBN is present on either book. Sometimes independent presses are more concerned with getting anything out at all than they are to make sure that what they have written is free from typos. Whether this is the case here is unknown, although the second book claims to be in the second printing so it has had some time for readers to notice these little details. Perhaps no one cares to point them out, or perhaps no one cares to fix them. After all, if your book is selling enough to make it to the second reprint, you are probably doing something right.

There is much here for a believer to contend with, and while a mature believer is not going to be swayed by certain points presented by the Grand Scrivener that are not necessarily the entire Biblical truth on a given subject, a newer believer might find themselves swept up by the arguments presented in order to feel like they are in the "strong club" of Christian believers. One supposes that Christ is beefy enough to deal with this dilemma, but it is an issue worth touching on. The Grand Scrivener is a highly persuasive writer, and he knows how to get the blood boiling. One has to make sure, though, that the blood is boiling in the direction of the right fight. One does not want to stand before the Judge of Judges and explain how they did not support Israel because they thought they were the real deal while everyone else were posers.

More of these kind of books should exist, though, and on the balance the Grand Scrivener probably does more good than harm. Doing something at all in regard to standing up to the psychos who want to rule the world has to earn some plaudits somewhere.

978-0385499088


June 28, 2026

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June 26, 2026